Lightroom Presets – Sharpening for Landscape and Outdoor Photos

I always get a lot of questions about sharpening in Lightroom and what settings to use. Well, if there’s ever a place where presets work great, sharpening is one of them. For the first round of sharpening presets, I figured I’d create a set specifically for landscape and outdoor photos. You’ll find these presets work best on photos where you want just about everything sharp (something that’s typical for landscape photos). You’ll notice there’s 3 different versions in this one. It really just depends on the photo and how much extra “detail” it can handle. Some can handle a lot of detail and look great with the Strong setting, while other photos will tend to get that crunchy look and use the Light setting better.

Don’t forget that you need to zoom in to at least 100% to see the effects of any sharpening on your photos in Lightroom.

Before:

After:

The preset downloads for Lightroom 4 are below (I made them for LR4. You can try them in LR3 but they’re tuned for LR4 specifically):

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.